Early Access Game

Get instant access and start playing; get involved with this game as it develops.

Note: This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you
should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more

What the developers have to say:

Why Early Access?

“We strongly believe that Early Access is the best model to explore new VR experiences. We’ve invested a lot of resources into this concept and it is very promising. But as a VR Multiplayer game, we are targeting a niche within an already small niche -- Our game won’t be ready for a full launch until we’ve implemented online multiplayer and a full single player campaign.

By releasing early, we are seeking your feedback and support as we develop the full scope of the game.

We want to provide a polished VR game that is fun for both VR and non-VR players. We operate in a self-sufficient manner as a small team of programmers. We work with external partners on the Art and Audio. All income earned in early access will be reinvested into those areas.

We develop in the open and need your feedback to build the most fun and comfortable experience possible.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“We plan 9-12 months of development depending on the final scope of the single player campaign. This may change depending on how much we can invest into external assets.

We are using Early Access for two things:

To get feedback on the game so we can improve it

To evaluate if there is a market for local VR multiplayer games

We are a small studio, a couple programmers and we work with outside artists for Art, Animation and Audio. We are self-sufficient internally but with your support we can invest into our external art requirements.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“Our aim for the full version is to contain:

Round-based multiplayer with headset hot seats

6 - 7 diverse game modes

Character customization

Polished art to replace all the prototype art

In Depth Tutorial for VR Novices

This is in addition to what is already available in the current version.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“The Early Access version is a playable alpha, which contains:

Asymmetric local multiplayer, 1 VR + 4 non-vr players

Single-player Challenges and Missions against AI Bots

A solid, intuitive movement system - move, grab, eat, throw

Keyboard and Gamepad support for non-vr players, drop-in and out of games.

Several game modes, including Last Man Standing, Team Deathmatch, Hide and Seek, Bullrun and UFO Invaders

5 Maps

Sandbox area

An experimental area where throw in new ideas that are not quite fully done yet but are fun in-house so we thought we’d share because sharing is caring.

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

Tell us what you like and what you don’t like. Share your experiences. We enjoy reading your feedback and we will use it to guide our process. We will regularly seek your input on major features. Some decisions will be put to a vote. Buy the game and shape its future.

Some of you have spent countless hours under the headset have tons of unique experiences to share. We want to your knowledge to help us improve Late For Work.

Comfort in VR is both incredibly important and hard to get right. Different players can have a vastly different definitions of what is “comfortable” in VR. Share your experiences and help us make our controls and our comfort options as awesome as possible.”

Buy Late For Work

May 19

We're excited to bring you Update 10, our special Spring Cleaning edition. It's the proverbial 'tock' to our tick-tock release strategy of delivering new gameplay one update and improving core systems the next. We did a lot under the hood and a lot in preparation for future updates (and new unannounced projects). Read on for more details.

Performance

We did a big pass on performance. As you know, we not only render in VR but also up to four separate views in splitscreen. This has a fairly big impact on performance and we keep a close eye on it. We did a major pass on performance (our third since we launched in Early Access) and made a lot of improvements. We shaved off roughly 3ms off an average frame. Considering we aim for 90fps, we only have ~11ms to play with, so we're pretty happy with this improvement.

New Language Support

Thanks to the awesome @Mr.Stump we now have language support for Ukrainian and Russian. As a reminder, we are willing to add support for any language, if you're willing to help us translate it. Find out how on this thread.

Gameplay Balancing

We took another run at the UFO mode in the forest. The map was way too big and open, making it super difficult for the VR player. Too much land to cover and fast moving UFOs makes for exhausted unhappy players. We've tweaked the AI as well as they were a bit to hardcore. We experimented with changing the number of lives but didn't love any new values so left it as it is for now.

Let us know what you think!

Bug Fixes

We found and fixed a litany of bugs. The full list is available in the changelog below. We hope this new build feels a lot more stable.

What's Next?

We're slowly working towards a 1.0 release. We haven't finalized what will be in it, but we're working on that. We should have more news over the summer, stay tuned and let us know what you would like to see.

Please read on for the full changelog for this update. We hope you enjoy it!

Changelog - Build 443

Improvements

Language: added support for Russian and Ukrainian, a very big thank you to @Mr.Stump

March 28

Today we are super excited to release one of our biggest updates yet to our local multiplayer asymmetric party game. We've got a new exciting fast-paced game mode that had our student intern sweating and out of breath from all mad dash efforts to protect the local populace (and cattle) from being abducted by mysterious visitors from worlds beyond. Read on for more details!

New UFO Game Mode

This is the first game mode where we had concept art influence gameplay ideas. I mean, we've toyed with a lot of gameplay ideas, but our excellent concept artist drew the art work above a few months ago. In January, when reviewing what chunky new gameplay we could bring to LFW, we settled on the UFO mode. It sounded so fun and we already had all the art.

This game mode features a brand new aerial vehicle with 3D translation movement, i.e. you can fly in all directions. And an abduction beam. Your goal? Why of course, the traditional alien invader job: to abduct all humans and cows. The gorilla cannot stand idly by and see his fellow countrymen ripped away from their lives to end up who knows where.

This mode is not final, we will keep tweaking it. But our early tests have led to quite few hilarious moments. We're also thinking about new possible weapons and power-ups we can add. We'd love to hear your feedback and impressions.

New Tutorial

A brand new Tutorial: our old tutorial was not bad, but a bit limited and some players would occasionally get stuck. Our goal is that our games are so intuitive and well guided that you can always pick it up on your own. We're not satisfied until we can just hand over controls to players and just step out of the way.

So we rebuilt it from the ground up, including little humans guiding you through your tasks and providing feedback. We leveraged a system we built for an internal prototype of something new (shhhhh, can't comment on this just yet).

It's still not perfect and will need further tweaking. We also would like to add a whole second part to the tutorial, as well as some mini-tutorials for the non-vr players.

Tank Auto-aim

In our never ending efforts to make the tanks more fun and easy to control, we've added an auto-aim lock mode. Using the left trigger you can now lock onto the gorilla and fire (nearly) perfect shots. This will hopefully come in handy for players who struggle with the dual stick controls. Feedback is very welcome. We are worried this makes the tanks too easy to play with now.

Multiplayer Menu

We redesigned the multiplayer menu screen. Our single page multiplayer was quickly becoming limiting as we added more game modes and maps. We've now implemented some long-desired changes. Creating a new round requires one or two clicks more, but we can now preview the game mode and map and easily restart a new round. This also lays the ground work for multi-round based local multiplayer games.

What's Next

Our next update is going to focus on two things:

Balancing and Gameplay improvements: we're going to refrain from implementing new game modes and maps and focus instead on improving the balance and fun of the current game modes. We have a lot of ideas on how to make the current game modes more fun and dynamics, with new power-ups (including for the Gorilla!), new goals and challenges.

Internal cleanup and refactoring: the last few weeks have revealed a number of systems built on shaky foundations and a clear set of behaviors we need to improve. We will spend time to stabilize these to make it easier to continue adding new maps, game modes and features to the game.

Of note: we did a major upgrade to our underlying engine (more details in the changelist below) and we have noticed a few difficult-to-reproduce issues, including an occasional crash. If you run into any issues please do let us know either here in the comments or in our forums. Thank you!

Changelog - Build 416

Improvements

UFO: added a UFO vehicle, with a new camera angle, an abduction behavior and vertical movement

UFO: allow camera to be pitched up and down with snapback behavior

UFO: small particle effect when abductees are absorbed

UFO: result screen, show kills and abductions

UFO: adapted the forest map and the town map as locations for the game mode

About This Game

In Late For Work, one player is a giant gorilla doing gorilla things. Up to 4 other players try to take down the gorilla in an epic local multiplayer VR party game. Work together to bring down the monster of immeasurable strength. Or run for your dear life. It’s an intense party game for your living room.

The game brings VR and non-VR players together into a shared experience. Swap out in-between rounds and see who can earn ultimate banana bragging rights in this crazy free for all.

Features

Fast-paced intense rounds. Take turns under the headset. Plot your next takedown.

Local multiplayer party game: a great way to include all your friends in a VR experience.

Fun, over-the-top physics where every object is a potential weapon and shield.

====

Late For Work is actively in development - the current status and upcoming features can be found in our roadmap: roadmap.lateforworkgame.com